In Stratford on Avon the Lib Dem vote rose by 1.7% — higher than the national rise of 1%. Two weeks ago, our poll figures were putting us in contention to win this seat, but the change in the national mood — largely fuelled by the ‘only Cameron can get Brown out’ message pedalled by national newspapers, and now shown to be vacuous — meant that we got none of the 16% boost that we were looking at.

My congratulations to Nadhim Zahawi, who fought a good campaign.

To the 29% of the electorate here who voted for me: Thank you. We have not won this time, but that does not mean we will not win next time. Thank you for the confidence you placed in me. As I promised in my campaign literature, I will continue to live here and work here, and continue to press for all the issues which were so important during the campaign.

We may well see another General Election in the next six months… so don’t settle back down to ‘business as usual’.

For now, we wait the outcome of the discussions between leaders. All must surely recognised that for the Lib Dems nationally to gain 1% and yet lose 5 seats, and to get almost 1/4 of the votes and substantially less than 10% of the seats, demonstrates clearly that our election system is now desperately in need of reform.

Related posts

• Delighted to be selected for Stratford upon Avon (0)
• Why I don’t respond to blanket ‘pledge’ campaigns (0)
• Who now can claim that the Daily Telegraph helped democracy? (0)
• We keep up relentless pressure on Tories in Stratford on Avon (0)
• Tory MP to step down (1)

This is refreshing, and transparent, and laudably quick.

I do now feel that the outstanding issues have been answered, and I have written back to them to tell them so. Evidently a great deal of thought and research went into the proposals, and many of the fears which have been put to me by local people — especially the fear that Stratford-upon-Avon railway station would eventually close — have now been put to rest.

A certain part of me still feels that these questions could have been answered openly to begin with — but, given the speed with which they responded, I really can’t fault them.

Of course, there is still a great deal of work to be done, and many negotiations must be concluded. Things might still go wrong. But the way in which the planners responded gives me a great deal of confidence that they will see to it that things do not go wrong.

Once again — this is refreshing, and should not be forgotten.

Related posts

• Enough of the talk, time for some action (0)
• End is begin (1)
• Delighted to be elected Chair of Lib-Dem Parliamentary Candidates Association (0)
• “Stupid” goes to ethics committee (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)

More seriously, Alternative Vote is not a true proportional system — up to 49 per cent of the votes would still be discarded, meaning that a government can still be elected with an absolute majority on around 30 per cent of the total national vote.

This paragraph is going to be short and mercifully simple. But if you lack the Liberal Democrat passion for discussing complex voting systems, please feel free to skip to the next paragraph.

So: in first past the post, you put down one X on the ballot paper, and, late that night, the candidate with the most Xs wins. The candidate may have gained not much more than 1/3rd of the total vote, and, often, only three quarters of the voters will have voted. As trust in politics declines, the numbers voting shrinks, and so our elected leaders have less and less of a mandate. The alternative vote system gives you a 1-2-3 etc choice of your favourite, second favourite, and so on. When the votes are counted, the least successful candidate is eliminated, and their second choices are distributed among the remaining candidates. This carries on, until one candidate has more than 50 per cent of the vote, and they are the winner. All the remaining votes are discarded. Although this is marginally more successful at giving people an MP they are happy with, it does not mean at all that the government is elected based on the votes cast across Britain. There’s a variation, AV plus, which I won’t go into, which is a much more proportional system. Truly proportional voting comes with the Single Transferable Vote, which is hideous to work out on paper, but which computers can do as easily as AV, AV plus, or even first past the post. And, these days, even the government has computers.

So where does that leave us? The one thing that the Alternative Vote Labour has pushed for tonight will give us is a system where it is much harder for a Conservative government ever to be elected. Gordon Brown may be counting on getting the support of Lib-Dems because of his fig-leaf gesture towards a proportional system, but, in truth, this is tinkering with the electoral system in order to change the result of future elections.

If Labour had done this, as it originally promised, when it first came to power, then we might have avoided much of the collapse of trust in politicians of the last ten years. Even Alternative Vote reduces the number of ‘safe’ seats which play no real role in an election. And it is in the safe seats that we have seen the greatest abuse of expenses. But this death-bed conversion smacks of nothing more than desperation. And it is a desperation which will surely further undermine the residual confidence the electorate has in government.

Quite simply, it is the wrong answer, too late.

Related posts

• In the nation’s interests (1)
• Still no action that deserves the name (0)
• Enough of the talk, time for some action (0)
• Cameron’s False Step (0)
• After 12 years in office, a senior Labour figure notices that the electoral system doesn’t really work… (0)

Staying on too long in parliament is like staying too long as the captain of a sports team, when you no longer have the fitness and reactions to be there. I feel this somewhat keenly at the moment, since, as of 1 January, I have stepped down from captaining the West Midlands fencing team. At the age of 43, I am more than twice as old as half of the team, and it was time to move on. The upper age for politics is rather older, but even MPs need to recognise when it’s time to go. This time, though, it’s not retirement and pension which is the issue — it’s the simple fact that MPs have lost our confidence. For some this is an unfair ‘guilty by association’, but others lost our trust because they abused it. For the good of the team, they need to be off.

It appears, though, that not everyone has got the message. In fact, we have politicians who fought tooth and nail against Heather Brooke’s campaign for full disclosure of expenses, voted against it in parliament, and then tried to resurrect their careers and put one over on their opponents by representing themselves as the peoples’ champions when the Telegraph got hold of the story.

We are expecting a number of announcements over the next weeks. Some MPs can honourably step down, having worked hard for many years for the good of their constituents. They deserve our respect. Some MPs who are expenses-damaged but still holding on should go. That way, they can win back some of our respect, and ensure that the next parliament is given the best possible start with a clean slate.

It will be a long, hard job to win back the confidence of the public. But it is a job which must be done, no matter how hard, nor how long.

Related posts

• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Who now can claim that the Daily Telegraph helped democracy? (0)
• Time not for a general, but a special election (0)
• Three li(n)es we should all reject (0)

What kinds of Prime Minister are there? I made a little list: Leaders, Managers, Administrators, and Caretakers.

Gordon Brown is a caretaker. He came in at the dog-end of the Blair years, and was instantly faced with crisis after crisis. The poor man has never got his head above water. The things he did well (the Millennium debt campaign, for example) are all forgotten about. Nobody can really point to anything he has done especially badly. It’s just that crises gather round him and he doesn’t seem to have the power to sort them out and get on with his real agenda. In fact, more than anything else, the public’s un-love affair with Gordon is based on him not having an agenda at all.

John Major was an administrator. Aside from the personal things (you can imagine him carefully filling in all the forms, and frowning when anyone had written in the space marked ‘do not write in this space’), his approach to Britain was to carefully make sure that we were fulfilling expectations, doing our duty, moving the agenda long in safe increments. But it wasn’t his agenda, and, since he’d been voted in because he wasn’t Thatcher, it wasn’t her agenda either. Really, it was the ‘Victorian values’ agenda — harking back to a time when politicians were good, and the people were good, and Britain could be proud of its place in the world, because it was good. John Major never went to university (he did a correspondence course in banking instead). If he had done, he would probably have discovered that history is not quite as simple as he thought it was, and that nostalgia is not all it used to be.

Cameron wants to be a manager. ‘Let us look after the economy, and we’ll do it somewhat better’, is his appeal to the electorate. I’m reminded of a story I read about a new manager who arrived at a company and found three envelopes on his desk, with a note: “If things are not going well after three months, open envelope 1. If things are not going well after six months, open envelope 2. If things are not going well after nine months, open envelope 3.” After three months, things were not going well, so he opened envelope 1. Inside was a note, which said “Blame your predecessor.” After six months, he felt obliged to open envelope 2. Inside, the note said: “Predict that things will shortly get better.” He duly did so. However, as things still did not improve, he found himself opening envelope 3 after nine months. The note inside was terse: “Prepare three envelopes”.

The ever fickle public may well believe that Cameron could not possibly do it worse than Brown, and may want to give him a chance. I have to say, I think that that confidence is misguided. But Cameron has no compelling vision of the future of Britain, and absolutely no vision at all of the future of politics in Britain. He wants to keep as much of the system intact as he can in the face of the overwhelming public hatred for the political class and their expenses. He will duck and dive and say all the right things. But Cameron will not be any kind of a reforming leader, and, to give him his due, he has never promised to be. If elected (and contacts in Mori are now saying it is unlikely he will obtain a sufficient majority), he will be blaming Brown after three months and after six predicting recovery.

Tony Blair, of course, saw himself as a great leader. As did Margaret Thatcher. But, of course, both of them led us into trouble. Thatcher established greed as the one great spiritual value of the nation and tried to turn it into policy with the poll tax, charging people based not on their ability to pay, but on the simple fact of their existence. Blair led us straight into the arms of George W Bush, and thence into the Iraqi desert. Leaders will be judged by history more strictly than managers, administrators and caretakers. It’s probably fair to say of John Major that he did no real harm, and of Brown that he did no real anything.

However, this is not the time for a caretaker, or an administrator, or even a manager. The expenses scandal is not the cause of what is wrong with politics, it is merely a symptom of it. For years the role of the MP has become steadily less clear and less valuable. Prime ministers have become more presidential, cabinet has become steadily less answerable to parliament. When I was small, ministers resigned when their departments blundered. These days, they simply blame officials and sack them.

In the mean time, parliament has increasingly realised that all it actually does is make or block legislation, and play a supporting role to the government-opposition media prize fight. Unsurprisingly, we have ever more laws, and yet no greater justice. MPs talk constantly about efficiency savings that could be made, but every bill they pass makes life more complicated and requires the creation of more jobs to administer and supervise it. And, before we see that as some kind of useful job-creation, the people who really have the ability to manage such new laws would be better employed applying their talents to the great problems of state.

I do not remotely condone the misuse of tax-payers’ money (and, more importantly, the misuse of power and privilege which we the citizen voted them in for). But I understand why some MPs, arriving perhaps full of ideals only to discover that their significance in a stitched-up secret society is essentially zero, would then look around for something else to do. The devil has indeed made work for idle hands. Or, if not the devil, Mrs Thatcher, who, to support her articulation of greed as the basic principle of the economy, created a system which rewarded inventiveness and brazenness at the expense of public duty and honesty.

People are talking about a March election suddenly. Of course, Cameron is talking it up, because he knows that the sooner the election, the less chance that he or his party will have been caught saying or doing something really stupid. But the larger question goes unanswered: just what exactly are we electing? What is an MP’s job description? What are the hours? What are the duties? What constitutes a legitimate expense and what is simply misconduct. More importantly, what is the role of the House of Commons? Clearly not to scrutinise — the House of Lords does that, and, despite the archaic system, is more effective in doing it, because it has a robust group of cross-benchers and independently-minded lords political who ensure that it is not simply the whipping dog of the party in power. Hopefully not to generate yet more regulation and legislation. We have — in many parts of our life together — moved to the point where we are no longer protecting people, but actively curtailing their legitimate life aspirations.

Liberal Democrats may have been a voice crying in the wilderness for a long time, arguing that politics should be changed, that the safe-seat system (which is at the heart of the vast majority of the really serious expenses breaches) needs to be abolished and every vote should be counted, not just the few that are cast by floating voters in a vanishingly small number of swing seats, arguing that MP expenses should be made public, and for an end to Punch-and-Judy two-party politics. A voice crying in the wilderness, but the wilderness is now at our doorstep.

When leadership is needed, we would do best to those who have been pointing the way consistently throughout their careers, not those who jumped when the bandwagon suddenly became popular.

Related posts

• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Still no action that deserves the name (0)
• Quick fix will not restore public confidence (0)
• Poor Gordon’s perfect storm — and heeding the lesson of history (0)

The story so far: before the June County Council elections, the portfolio holder promised voters that there were no plans to cut the Warwickshire fire services. Almost immediately after the elections, a consultation was announced on ‘improvements’ to the services. People who read the document were bemused, because it was evidently paving the way for cuts, but it only talked explicitly about increasing numbers. Shortly afterwards, it became clear that the plan was essentially to dispense with retained fire-fighters and a number of fire stations, and to attempt to fill the gap created by taking on a much smaller number of full-time firefighters. Under questioning, through Freedom of Information requests by the Liberal Democrats, and in public meetings by residents from, among others, Bidford on Avon and Studley, it became clear that there would be a net reduction of more than fifty firefighters.

I reviewed the consultation document on behalf of local residents — you can read my original report Analysis of the Warwickshire Fire Consultation Documents — and discovered that it completely failed to reach the bare minimum standard for a public consultation.

Shortly afterwards, an FOI ((Freedom of Information requests must be answered within 21 days and give the public the power to demand documents produced by publicly funded bodies)) request from Councillors Peter Moorse and Hazel Wright, forced the release of the hitherto secret management review by Det Norske Veritas. You can read that here: Det Norske Veritas Risk Review. The questioning, balanced view of the Norwegian company which provided the work contrasted very, very sharply with the confident, essentially patronising language of the consultation document. I wrote a second report on this, which you can read here: Comparison between Consultation documents and Det Norske Veritas risk report.

Since then, in a series of public meetings and protests, it has become clear that nobody except the Conservative cabinet of Warwickshire County Council, and those who report to them, is in favour of the plans put forward. Even Conservative district councillors (mindful no doubt that they are up for election next year) and Conservative MPs (mindful almost certainly of the same unpleasant truth) and prospective parliamentary candidates are distancing themselves — at least in public. We should remember that, no matter how much county councillors, district councillors and MPs like to present themselves as different from each other, a political party must stand or fall together. If they really cannot agree, they should leave the party. That is how politics works.

There are three fundamental reasons why this consultation process and the plans behind it cannot stand. Any one of them should be enough to persuade the Warwickshire cabinet that it is time to call time on these plans.

First, the consultation document is in a very real sense a false prospectus. We are told that if we don’t agree with it, we can put our own views forward. That is how consultation is supposed to work. But this relies on an accurate, complete and comprehensible presentation of the plans. The consultation documents put forward are none of these. A number of people, including a number of lawyers, have suggested that the process will fail at Judicial Review. But this is simply madness. Are we really going to drag each other through the courts? Is that worth wasting the tax-payer’s money on? If the issue were some complex and contentious point of law, then that perhaps would be the right solution. But there is no need to test these documents in the courts. There is a national standard (and a county standard), and the proposal document completely fails to satisfy it. It should therefore be withdrawn, without any recourse to the courts.

It is not enough (as the Cabinet portfolio holder has suggested) to accept that the documents are poor but to count on the public meetings to provide legitimate consultation. Where the written documents are inadequate, there can be no confidence that the two sides in a public meeting are even talking about the same thing. How can Cabinet determine the difference between responses based on a sound understanding of the real proposals and their consequences from those based on the original consultation document? Again, they have suggested that, since they have published additional documents, the public can reasonably be expected to have read the subsequent documents. Once more, not so! This would effectively invalidate early responses. Furthermore, it would require the collators of the responses to be able to track which version of the information the public was responding to.

Secondly, and more importantly, even if we take the original consultation document at face value, no compelling case has been made for why change should take place. The documents do not identify any particular inadequacies of the existing service. To be sure, they offer some suggestions of things which it would be nice to have — a boat, more money for smoke alarms, specialist units for road accidents, more training — but they do not make any case whatsoever for what is wrong with our current arrangements. If there is nothing wrong with them, why should we even entertain (let alone accept) a set of changes which will have dire consequences for at least fifty fire-fighters, will damage the lives of the communities from which the stations are taken and, potentially (since we never really know the consequences of our decisions until it is too late) will result in the loss of life and property across the county.

Of course, it could be the case that a prospective Conservative government is about to substantially reduce the budget available for fire-fighting. Perhaps the County Council cabinet knows this, and perhaps so do the MPs and district councillors. But, if that is the case, they owe it to us to tell us. It is not enough to say “we’re doing this for your own good — we just can’t tell you why”. If change is in the wind, then we need to know this.

We imagined that all would be clear when we got the (then) secret management report. But this is not the case. The management report comments on the haste with which they were asked to analyse the risks. In their conclusions, they state explicitly that a full risk analysis should be undertaken. I put this to one of the leaders of the consultation process, after the Bidford public meeting. He told me that ‘consultants always try to get more work for themselves’, and explained that it was always certain that the consultants would recommend a further report. Ok. Fair enough. But, if you didn’t want the answer, why did you ask the question? If consultants were certain to say that the timescales were too tight, and more work was needed, what was the point of asking them at all? But, having asked them, the Warwickshire Cabinet is honour-bound (and, by the standards of the National Audit Office, duty bound) to take their report seriously.

Thirdly, and most importantly, we know that the police, and also the Health and Safety Executive, are still investigating the tragic Atherstone on Stour fire of two years ago. The Det Norske Veritas references this fire more than once. Well sourced, but strictly anonymous, insiders tell us that one of the main drivers of the proposed changes to the fire service are a way of dodging criticism which the county council is expecting when the results of those investigations are published. They will be able to argue (we are informed) that the service has changed radically, and therefore the criticisms will relate to the past, not to the present.

All of Warwickshire mourned the deaths of the firefighters on that day. All of us, of course, want changes to the way things are done to minimise the risks that people who risk their lives for us should run. But. Absolutely crucially, until the results of those investigations are published, we will not know in what ways things should change. How does county council cabinet know that it won’t be making things worse with its changes? Certainly not based on the results of the risk report, which suggests that reducing the total number of firefighters will increase the risks. Certainly not based on the work of other fire-services. The Atherstone investigation has already cost £4million. If the police could simply have looked up best practice and compared it with what actually happened, the investigation could have been finished within weeks of the fire. It is absolutely right that the police and the Health and Safety Executive take their job seriously. We owe that to those who gave their lives, and to their families and friends. It is also right that they work exhaustively if that is what is needed to discover the truth. But the greater their investment of time and money, the more foolish it is to second-guess it.

The public has already put £4 million on the table to find out how things should change. Warwickshire’s fire service proposals are a cheap attempt to second guess that investigation. There is no worthwhile evidence that the current proposals will make things better. Many frontline firefighters believe passionately that they will make things dramatically worse.

But the madness is that we do not need to sit around arguing about it. We only need to wait until the investigation is done.

Which is why this consultation, and the proposals behind it, are utterly, utterly wrong.

They are the wrong proposals, at the wrong time, put forward in a way which is so poor that no real information can be gathered from consulting the public at all.

Farce. Fiasco. All the usual words are simply inadequate.

County Councillors, if you are reading this, pull the plug on the Warwickshire fire services consultation. You owe it to yourselves. More importantly, you owe it to us.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Still no action that deserves the name (0)
• After the fire… (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Telegraph should not be so smug (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)

But, strangely, the bumbling honesty of Gordon Brown (despite his alleged ‘dark heart’, whatever that is supposed to be), is the exact antidote to the Blair spin machine that everyone wanted while we were all being Campbelled and Mandlesoned.

Once again, the public knows what it wants — until it gets it. At that point, it wants what it had before.

But there’s a serious point here. No matter what the home-spun virtues of Brown’s ‘what you see is what you get’ government — generally what you see is a comedy of chaos — a house divided can in no sense stand. Blears, Smith and Flint (the window-dressing trio) have caused him no end of harm. Milliband(s) have not really helped. Mandelson’s leaked email from earlier in the year has hardly improved things.

So, which would you rather have? Or perhaps neither. It’s interesting to see how Cameron is modelling himself on Blair and presenting himself as Blair’s true spiritual successor. But do we really want to go back to the Blair years? Even Blair-lite?

Margaret Thatcher changed British politics for ever. Not through her (in my opinion) authoritarian economic policy, nor (though its impact on society was profoundly damaging) her exaltation of greed, but through the dismantlement of the power of the civil service. The rise of special advisers — political servants of the party in power, paid for by the taxpayer — has brought a different shape to politics, and a particular cycle of power.

Before Thatcher, a prime minister could lose office, go back into opposition, win again, and remain an MP afterwards. Since Thatcher, this has become unthinkable. The cycle of government is now as follows: landslide victory, confident beginning, in-term change of direction, in order to ensure a second or even third victory, but, as an inevitable consequence of increasingly opportunistic policy change, a collapse of the authority of the prime minister, ending in the reign of a new, weak figure, who can neither lead his own party nor inspire the nation. Thatcher to Major is exactly replicated in Blair to Brown.

I am not suggesting that we should try to go back to the days of Harold Wilson and Edward Heath. Times have moved on. But we must do something to avoid the destructive cycle of Thatcher-Major and Blair-Brown. Major’s term and Brown’s coincided with economic recession. The confidence of Thatcher and Blair had as much to do with the rising world economy during their time in office as with anything they did themselves. They were confident times, and the nation found it easy to believe that things could get better.

Our boom and bust economy is not an inevitable consequence of the world economic cycles. But it is an inevitable consequence of governments who exploit all the power of the state — power beyond anything available to a mere prime-minister in the pre-Thatcher days — to hold on to power to the very last moment possible.

In the Major years we believed that his problems were down to his perilously narrow majority, which made him vulnerable to every back bench rebellion. But threatened men can live long. Brown still has an enormous majority, and yet can barely command his own cabinet reshuffle.

Labour is tired-out, completely exhausted by its efforts to maintain power at all costs. But Cameron, for all his promises of reforming politics, really has no ambition beyond emulating his heroes Thatcher and Blair — acquiring power as firmly as possible, and then husbanding a diminishing majority over two, perhaps three terms.

As Britain, we do not need to play this game, and we cannot afford to. With each cycle, engagement in politics among the electorate drops dramatically, and interest in extremist, sometimes anti-democratic, parties grows.

I could play the Liberal-Democrat card and say that the problem is our electoral system. There is some truth in that. But the much greater problem is the ambition of our politicians.

And, in the mean time, the house that Tony built, and his successors divided like Alexander’s generals, cannot stand, if it remains thus divided.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Still no action that deserves the name (0)
• Labour MPs call Blair to go, Tories call Howard to stay: what are things coming to? (0)
• Give it a rest, Mr Cameron (0)
• Enough of the talk, time for some action (0)

As I said on BBC yesterday, I absolutely believe that the story should have come out, and I absolutely believe that MPs who have committed fraud should go to prison, while MPs who have organised their expenses in such a way as to game for a profit at the expense of the tax payer should resign from the House.

I also believe that this crisis has been handled badly. If the Speaker had had any sense, he would have released all the information about all the expenses the day that the story broke.

And yet, and yet. By milking the expenses scandal to the uttermost, and ensuring that it and it alone controlled the news to maximum effect, the Daily Telegraph has wiped out a generation’s already faltering confidence in its elected representatives. The Telegraph may argue that it has not tarred every politician with the same brush, but the result of its revelations is that all politicians are tarred. Go onto the streets of any town or city in the UK wearing a rosette of any of the major parties, and you will quickly hear people say ‘You’re all the same’. The Telegraph will certainly argue that it did not intend to mislead the public. But the result is that the public were misled. The Telegraph may argue that it did exactly what was necessary for a free press to survive. But the reality is that it did the opposite: in this story, at least, which has dominated the news agenda in the run up to the elections, we have seen not a free press, but a monopolistic press.

The result — and I do not remotely wish to claim that this was the Telegraph’s intention, although I would strongly argue that they should have foreseen it — is that fascism is once more on the rise in Britain, electorally stronger than at any time in British history.

Who now can claim that the Daily Telegraph, in so doing, has helped democracy?

Share/Save

Related posts

• Are single issue parties the answer? Not exactly… (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Taxpayer, voter, citizen or stakeholder? (0)
• Still no action that deserves the name (0)

But all this is just talk. No MP has ceased to be an MP. Even the biggest culprits remain in parliament, collecting their salary and expenses. Only the Speaker, Michael Martin, will actually be leaving the House before a General Election forces the issue.

In the first episode of Yes Prime Minister, Jim Hacker was advised that if we were to make a speech announcing radical change, he should wear a conservative suit and speak sonorous, reassuring words. On the other hand, if his speech announced nothing, it should be an ultra-modern suit with a brash, exciting background. David Cameron, at least, is playing the modern suit and brash background game. He knows that he has by far the most to lose. Before this scandal, the Conservatives had the next election more or less sown up, with new woes striking Gordon Brown’s Voyage of the Damned government every week. Now, although the Daily Telegraph has done its best to point the rhetoric at Labour ministers, it is the Tories who are easily the most damaged: moats, duck islands, money paid for extensions and electronics, money paid to family members who lived too far away to be any help, light bulbs, tennis courts, and so on.

So far he’s talked a good game, but, as in the past when he has been challenged to give real policies on key issues, he has dodged it. It’s not just that he fails to offer something bold and revolutionary. Bold is not always best. It’s that his ‘nip and tuck’ of reforms do not connect at all with the issue of MP’s pay, allowances or expenses. They are all rebadged right-of-centre ideas for laissez-faire politics. Fewer MPs with more power, more opportunities for the government to distance itself from unpopular legislation, extra transparency for civil servants, who are, in any case, not implicated in this row.

So, no MP (except Michael Martin) will be standing down before they have to — remember that the ones who are ‘resigning’ had virtually no chance of surviving the humiliating gauntlet of local anger, so what they are really doing is an exercise in self-preservation. And no policies have been put forward for how MP expenses should be reformed.

For this is the thorny issue. If MPs need two homes, then, contrary to what the BBC would suggest, they are not over-remunerated, but, at least until the housing market collapsed, seriously under-remunerated. If Cameron or Brown puts forward anything anywhere near as radical as the man in the street would like, it will almost certainly be rejected by MPs who, even if they are staring down the barrel of an electoral gun, are not going to vote to bankrupt themselves.

On the other hand, the Taxpayer’s Alliance suggestion (and mine as well, arrived at independently) for simply providing each MP with a residence in London for the duration of their time as MPs, and not beyond, though hugely beneficial to the next round of MPs, who will not be forced to risk their financial futures buying property in an uncertain market, leaves the current crop with a difficult problem. They will either be forced (financially, not legally) to dispose of homes which may be more important to them than their constituency home, or they will have to pay the mortgage on two homes on a salary which would serve them very well in, say, East Birmingham, but would scarcely cover one home in Tunbridge Wells or Maidstone.

Of course, I still favour my own suggestion.

It is Nick Clegg, whose stature as a man of real insight and penetrating decisions has grown substantially over the last weeks, who has probably got the most sensible tack: don’t let the MPs go home for the holidays until they sort it out.

Because, no matter how much we all believe MPs should not be allowed to vote on their own pay and conditions, the changes which must happen right now, if parliament is to recover any semblance of public confidence, must be set out and agreed by themselves. The problems will not go away over the holidays, nor will they become less acute. Unless something genuine and compelling is decided, agreed and enacted before they break up, then public anger will rise throughout the summer. Poor Julie Kirkbride has already had her windows smashed. But, judging by the anger of some of the people I met today in Stratford, that sort of reaction is going to get worse.

And that would take us into entirely new territory — territory which we should avoid, at almost all costs.

Share/Save

Related posts

• In the nation’s interests (1)
• Still no action that deserves the name (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)
• We should reform now, but we cannot transform until we agree what politics is for (0)
• Voter intention 36:36:24 (1)

But — once the now almost inevitable leadership challenge has prematurely ended his premiership — his legacy will have been the perfect storm of crisis in Westminster, economic meltdown, and environmental collapse.

Brown waited ten years for the best job in politics, and within two years almost every shred of authority has fallen from him.

We are, of course, nowhere near the position of Germany in the 1930s. Confidence in our democracy has not collapsed to that extent, and our economy — though in poor shape — is not remotely like that of the Weimar republic.

Nonetheless — even accepting that our position, though appalling, is not desperate as theirs was — we must learn something. The extremist parties are already rushing to cash in on the combination of economics and crisis of trust. UKIP have lost an MEP to the criminal justice system as a result of benefit fraud, and yet they are attempting to make capital out of the ‘dishonesty’ of the MPs of the mainstream parties. Other groups, more extreme, widely exposed in the media for what they really are, are flooding the streets of susceptible areas with their promises to clean up politics.

Politics must be cleaned up, but the extremist parties are not the ones to do it. Great Britain must hold its nerve through this crisis. Electing someone just because they are ‘different’ is no sound basis for the future.

Gordon Brown’s tragedy is a personal one. He longed to serve his country, but the times were not right. We must not allow his to become our national tragedy. We are in danger of electing the most right wing set of MEPs in our European history, and in danger of doing the same thing at Westminster when the General Election comes.

Reactionary, right wing politics is no more likely to lead to upright, honest politicians than any other random stab in the dark. It is terribly hard, but Britain must rally round the core of centre politicians who have not been tarnished (except by rhetoric) in this scandal.

We owe it to ourselves.

Share/Save

Related posts

• Telegraph may have paid £300,000 to criminals for scandal leak, it emerges (1)
• Restoring trust – how? (0)
• Election talk: fluff (0)
• After 12 years in office, a senior Labour figure notices that the electoral system doesn’t really work… (0)
• Wrong answer too late. (0)